


Five Times Will Woke Up Under a Watchful Eye, and One Time He Returned the Favor

by kageygirl



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-12
Updated: 2011-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kageygirl/pseuds/kageygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all vigils are lonely. Not all awakenings are rude.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Will Woke Up Under a Watchful Eye, and One Time He Returned the Favor

**Author's Note:**

> Minor spoilers through "Kali III."

1.

Waking up is like digging his way out of an avalanche, his body stiff, uncoordinated, uncooperative. He fights to open his eyes with numbed determination. It feels like he's been drugged.

Will _hates_ being drugged.

"I know, Will. It'll wear off soon," cuts through the cold, lights his way to the end of the tunnel. He aims for the voice, lets it drag him out. "You'll be all right."

He finally, finally gets his eyes open, and he's propped in an infirmary bed. Whatever happened, he hasn't been out long, and it's not that bad, judging by the fact that he's still got his own clothes on. But his head weighs about a million pounds, and Magnus is there, by his bedside. She's holding a small plastic water cup and watching him with a neutral expression. He hasn't got a hope of deciphering it, as sluggish as his brain is.

He blinks, and sucks in a breath, and considers both of those to be pretty damn impressive accomplishments, considering. "What happened?"

His voice rasps out of him, and Magnus steps closer. She holds the plastic cup to his mouth and offers him the straw. He'd be embarrassed as hell, but his hands aren't any lighter than his head just yet. She lets him take a sip of room-temperature water, and then asks, "What do you remember?"

Will's eyes fall to his right leg, and there's a crease across his jeans, the kind he gets when he wears a holster. His hand twitches at the sense memory of strapping it on, and the wheels start grinding, slowly. "It was... an abnormal. Marine Industrial Park." He frowns up at her. "Dogs were being poisoned?"

"Not poisoned, as it turns out." She lifts her chin, indicating his currently useless state. "Rendered unconscious."

"Right. Got it." Literally, it seems. But oh, hey, his muscles are thawing out, starting to work again. He stretches his neck carefully, and maybe it's the blood flow, but things get clearer in his head. "You thought it was some kind of abnormal primate, right?"

"A Greater Shrouded Howler, yes. Which it was, and we caught it." Her lips twist in a sympathetic smile. "But it turned out there were two of them."

"Of course there were." The life's coming back to his arms and legs, now, and Will plants his hands to get himself sitting up straight. "I walked right into the second one, didn't I?"

"Not... exactly." Magnus smiles wider, now more like ten-percent sympathy, ninety-percent amusement. "She seemed to develop an instant aversion to you, specifically."

"Great. Awesome. I have a knack for attracting pissed-off abnormals. I should put that on my resume." Will gets ready to swing his legs over the side of the bed, and Magnus sets the cup on the bedside table, putting a hand out to steady him if he wobbles.

Her brow's furrowed just the tiniest bit, but he appreciates that she's not trying to stop him. "It does seem to happen rather often, doesn't it?"

"No, it's good. Really. I _love_ being the bait." Will gets his feet set and stands up, and though he feels like he could really use another nap to recover from the first one, he stays up under his own power.

"You bring it on yourself, you know." He glances up at her, and the frown's gone--instead, she raises her eyebrows at him. "You should work on being less irresistible."

She's still right next to him--hasn't moved back from catch-him-if-he-falls range--but her enigmatic smile is no less so when seen from close up. He shakes his head, grins at her, and says, "You know, I can honestly say, I've never been accused of that before."

"Perhaps you've been talking to the wrong people," she says, with a gleam in her eye, and makes an "after you" motion at the door. Her heels click out an even, unhurried rhythm on the floor behind him as he works his way carefully across the room, feeling a little more stable, a little more confident with each successful step--physically, anyway.

But Magnus has knocked his brain off-kilter, again, and it always takes him a little longer to get that balance back.

* * *

2.

There's a hand over his mouth, and another pressing his wrist into the pillow. Before he can start struggling in earnest, he's hit at the same time with a tracery of perfume and a whisper in his ear. "Shh, Will, shh," the barest breath of sound, and he nods, a little jerky, his heart still pounding.

She takes her hand off his mouth, but two fingers linger on his lips for a second, like a warning. He nods again, sharper, and her hair tickles against his neck when he turns his head to meet her eyes.

Maybe it's the jolt of waking up like that, but he's flooded with images all at once--the light from the open hallway door picks up reddish glints in Magnus's hair, makes her eyes shine. She's got one knee braced on the bed as she leans in over him, like she's about to pounce. Her hair must be curling just above his bare shoulder, to be teasing his neck like that, the same way she's nearly curled around his bare chest.

It arcs over him then like electricity, the knowledge, that forbidden _awareness_ , how truly stunning and sensuous she is. With Magnus crouched over him like that, in his bed, in the deep of the night, he's having real trouble jamming that awareness back into the compartment where he usually holds it at bay. He's trying his best to just keep himself collected, and hoping she can't tell in the dark that his skin is flushed.

She leans in again, just breathing against his ear, "The strigēs have escaped."

Will goes cold.

Avian abnormals, the kind that have inspired all kinds of myths over the centuries, and all of them deadly. He turns his head again, and sees the keen, focused look on her face.

"You're the last one up," she whispers, against the shell of his ear, and then slips him a pair of their high-tech earplugs. Strigēs are not just drawn to sound, they also emit a directional high-pitched shriek that pretty much shreds the human nervous system. Magnus backs off the bed and watches Will put in the earplugs, then hands him a stunner. She picks up another that she'd apparently left on his nightstand and moves to the doorway, keeping an eye on the hall while Will gets dressed, grabbing sweats and t-shirt and sneakers for the hunt.

 _She's watching you_ , says that traitorous frisson of awareness, whispering from his peripheral vision. And then Will has work to do, and he slams it back in its box.

* * *

3.

He would have thought he'd only shut his eyes for a minute, but when he looks again, Magnus is no longer at the computer array in the corner of her office, but back at her desk. Judging by the stacks of papers marshaled around her laptop like an encircling army, she's been there for a while.

Magnus under siege, while the cavalry catches forty winks.

Will pushes himself to his feet and scoops up the folders he'd brought with him to the sitting area by the fire. When he drops into a chair in front of her desk, Magnus looks up, and he shakes his head, still a little bleary. "Sorry about that. I'm supposed to be helping you out here."

"Who says you're not?"

"Not sacked out on your sofa, I'm not."

"I don't know about that. I quite like having you where I can keep an eye on you." The grin she gives him warms him almost as much as the fire. He returns it, then waves at the papers covering her desk.

"How goes the battle?"

"Holding the line. Actually, that saying about an army marching on its stomach has never seemed so appropriate." He raises his eyebrows, and she says, "Working on food supplies now."

"Ah, okay."

The Lima Sanctuary hadn't taken too much damage when their weather elemental escaped, but the squalls it caused have made power spotty in the area, and a lot of the roadways were washed out or choked with debris. Before Will's impromptu nap, they'd gotten as far as working out the transportation logistics of temporarily relocating some of the more delicate species of abnormals to other Sanctuaries.

He leans forward, eyeing upside-down the stacks on her desk. "How can I help?"

"Well, since you've demonstrated such an affinity for this work in the past..."

She hands him a printout, and Will glances over it.

Then he looks back to see her giving him a close-mouthed smile, eyes shiny and bright.

"The marine species," he says evenly. "You want me to find food for the aquatic abnormals."

Her smile gets wider.

"If any of them eat squid, they're going to get squid," he says, and she finally laughs. "I mean it. Squid for everyone. Calamari all around."

"As long as everyone stays healthy," she says, her voice merry, "I leave it in your capable hands."

Will stands up to fetch the tablet computer he'd left on the sofa and returns to his seat in front of her desk. "All right, don't let me drift off again. I'm no good to you if I'm out. Throw something if you have to."

Magnus shakes her head at him. "As I said, just having you nearby and out of trouble is a relief. My workload is so much lighter."

He chuckles at that, but there's an understanding that passes between them when he meets her eyes. On some level, she's not totally kidding about having him close, any more than he's just here because it's his job.

* * *

4.

Will's not sure what wakes him until he looks at the van's dashboard display--4:35am. Seems like the hours he's been keeping lately have started messing with his body clock.

There are sounds of movement from the back of the van, and then Magnus's voice floats through the metal mesh behind the front seats. "Will?

"I'm up," he says, and scrubs a hand over his face. He clambers out of the passenger seat and creakily makes his way around to the back of the van, where Magnus has left the door ajar for him, and hauls himself up. "You trying to take your turn _and_ mine both?"

"Not deliberately. I'm afraid I lost track of time for a while there." She rolls her seat further away from the door, and he drops into the near chair.

"Yeah, well, those completely motionless surveillance feeds can be pretty riveting," he says, but he feels an echo of disquiet. He's never sure Magnus getting lost in her thoughts in the dead of night is all that healthy for her. He squeezes his eyes shut, hard, then blinks them open again. "Please tell me there's coffee."

"Lucky for you, Henry shares that particular vice. He just stopped in." She hands him a tall steaming cup in a cardboard sleeve with the logo of the corner coffee shop on it.

"Oh, thank you for hypercaffeinated HAPs." Magnus turns away to check something on the far monitor, and Will takes a bigger swig than he should, but the stinging heat helps wake him up a little bit more. As he swallows, he glances down at the Sharpie marks on the cup, and frowns.

The coffee shop around the corner is open all night, catering mainly to nocturnal grad students. This is Melanie's handwriting, and Melanie gets off at the 3:45 shift change; she picked that shift because she's running an experiment in the biochem lab all week, and she needs to check her results at 4:15 precisely.

(She'd been cheerful and talkative when Will interviewed her, happy to help out the local P.D. he'd let her believe he was still part of.)

Bottom line, his coffee is almost an hour old. Still hot, though, and he glances around until he sees that one of Henry's aluminum-sided, foam-lined transport cases is unlatched and not quite squared-up against the wall. He tips the lid back, and there's a faint circular impression near one corner, slowly filling back in as the padding expands to its original shape.

Wow. Helen Magnus has just delivered him a bald-faced lie.

He looks up, and to her credit, she's looking right back at him. He tips his head to one side, and says, quietly, "Henry was not just here, and you did not just _accidentally_ let me sleep in."

Matching his tone, she says, "You're no use to any of us if you run yourself ragged, Will."

Will sighs, and sags in his chair, hearing the seat back give a faint squeak of protest. "I swear, you get a little bit dead one time, and people start treating you with kid gloves."

He watches Magnus's face get tight around the eyes, just the barest wince, and it occurs to him that maybe he should cut back on the dying jokes for a while.

He shakes his head and says, "The dreadwake pod's been taking the death of their patriarch pretty hard."

"And their primary active period is pre-dawn," she says, nodding. He's always impressed by the amount of active recall she has about the abnormals she's studied. "I do appreciate your dedication, Will." She gives him a tiny smile and says, "But that doesn't mean you shouldn't catch up on your rest when you can."

"Are you giving me permission to nap?"

"I'm asking you to take care of yourself," she says, and lays a hand on his arm, and he knows it's not just his boss, not just his physician, who winces at the thought of him dying.

"I will if you will," he says, because he knows who shouldered the lion's share of the burden when he was out of commission, and the concern here is not a one-way street.

She does nothing but look at him for a moment, then tilts her head at him. "Take care of myself? Or nap?" she asks, and draws her hand away slowly, letting it skate over his skin. She widens her eyes at him and says, "Because the latter could be construed as asking me to sleep with you, Will."

Will feels himself blushing, and he turns his head away, back to the monitors. He _knows_ she's just messing with him, but he can't trust anything he might say in response. He hears her stand up, slowly, probably keeping low to avoid colliding with the roof of the van.

She stops just behind him, and leans in, her voice a near-whisper in his ear. "I would hope that, _were_ you to ask me that, you would leave no room for confusion," she says, and rests a hand briefly on the back of his chair. Before she ducks outside, by accident or design, her nails trail across the nape of his neck.

He feels the tingling burn of their passage long after his blush has faded away.

* * *

5.

There was a time when Will might have balked at sharing a hotel room with Magnus, but by this point, they've shared tents and submarines and converted storage rooms and a crashed airplane fuselage. Sharing a hotel room in an overbooked city is damn near pedestrian by comparison.

The hotel is nice enough, but it's old, which means the rooms are small by modern standards. The obligatory desk fills the space between Will's bed and the window, and he falls asleep to the sound to Helen tapping away at her laptop, no more than arm's reach away.

He wakes to silence, and the feeling that he's being watched. But there's no sense of danger, and if he knows one thing, it's that Helen Magnus wouldn't have been taken out without quite a fight.

He opens his eyes, and finds her looking back at him from her seat at the desk, her face almost pensive. She doesn't seem surprised that he's awake. The room is filled with the kind of stillness that only creeps in after midnight, and Will keeps his voice low, unwilling to break it. "What's up?"

Magnus--no, this is Helen, giving off every indication that she's mastering her reticence in order to tell him something important. Helen is resting her elbows on the edge of the desk, hands clasped loosely in front of her, and the shaded desk lamp behind her casts her eyes in deep shadow. "Reminding myself that this would be a terrible idea."

It feels like such a delicate moment that Will doesn't want to move, as if he might startle a shy animal. "'This' being...?" he asks, as carefully as he's ever asked anything.

"This being," she says, and looks down at her hands. The one closer to Will moves toward him, and then tightens into a fist, before she flattens it against the desk. She looks over at him then, the veil gone from her eyes.

Will takes a deep breath--the first since he woke up, he's pretty sure--and sits up slowly, scooting back against the headboard to maintain the distance she seems to want. "So, this--reminding. Does it happen... often?"

Her gaze flicks down to his chest, and then back up. He's wearing a t-shirt, as he always does when they bunk together, but she's seen him without more than once. "More than I'd like."

Will nods, gently, though his mind is starting to race. "Usually when I'm out of it." She doesn't say anything, just drops her chin a fraction. "That's borderline creepy," he says, surprising a smile out of her, and he grins back, to show he didn't mean it. "It sounds lonely, though. Can I help? Talk you out of it, I mean. You know, live and in Technicolor."

She eyes him warily, and he curls his fingers in a Matrix-y "bring it" gesture. "Come on, lay it on me."

Helen gives him a longer look, and Will keeps himself still, lets her have the time. She finally asks, "Why don't I entirely trust your motives?"

"Because you're inherently suspicious and pessimistic. Which should be a deterrent for me, not you," he says, breezily, though there's a huge part of him that can't believe they're talking about this, in however oblique a fashion. That she hasn't shut him down yet. That he hasn't let it drop. "Come on, Magnus. Or are you afraid your arguments won't hold up?"

She shakes her head, but it's more disbelief than disagreement. "Brazen."

"There we go," he says, nodding to her. "Keep 'em coming."

She breathes out the faintest laugh, before folding her hands on the desk and squaring herself up to him. "Very well. You work for me." She purses her lips. "Though possibly not for much longer if you keep talking back to me like that."

"True, I do work for you, threats notwithstanding. And I'm in serious danger of losing all respect for you at any given time, anyway." Will props his elbow on the corner of the desk between his bed and the wall and leans his chin on his hand. "Not to mention, I completely believe you would use a relationship against me."

She give him a cool look, but shifts to match his posture, cradling her cheek in the palm of her hand. "I'm very much older than you are."

Will nods earnestly. "Yeah, there's nothing whatsoever cool about that. Or intriguing."

The shadow of a smile passes over her lips. She starts toying with the cheap plastic hotel pen, uncapping it and recapping it one-handed. "You're often a patient of mine."

"Right," he says, widening his eyes in a show of concern. "Your grasp of ethics _is_ pretty tenuous."

She turns serious then, meeting his gaze. "It might emotionally compromise you."

Will straightens and drops his hand to cover hers, rubbing his thumb over the back of her knuckles. Her skin is chilly. "And not sleeping together is going to stop me from doing everything in my power to keep you from getting yourself killed."

Her mouth twitches. Her voice drops then, so quiet. "It might emotionally compromise _me_."

Will goes still. "It might?"

Her expression is brutally bare for a moment, and then she looks away.

Will keeps his own hand from shaking by threading his fingers through hers and tugging. When she looks back at him, he squeezes her hand. "Seriously?"

The smile she gives him this time is full of resignation and self-awareness, and she lets him see both. "To be honest, I suspect it already has."

"Hey." Will can't stay put any longer, not after that. He slides down the bed, far enough to clear the edge of the desk, keeping hold of her hand the whole time. Helen lets him reel her in with that hand, the chair rolling easily, until her knees bump his. He smiles up at her, though his chest is getting a little tight, and keeping his breathing slow and even is starting to take some concentration.

Will's totally awake now, maybe more awake than he's ever been. Maybe because he _wants_ something more than he's ever wanted before.

"So--that means the damage is already done, right?" he says, aiming for lightness. He's pretty sure he misses, badly.

She slips her hand out of his and reaches for his face, drifting her fingers across his forehead, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth. Smoothing over tension points, he realizes, and smiles under her fingertips. She does as well, but then her eyes go distant.

He covers the back of her hand with his own, and she comes back into focus. "You went away for a second there," he says, dropping his hand.

Her smile turns a little misty, and she teases her fingers through the hair behind his ear. "Remembering something Winston said once."

Churchill. Will keeps from smirking, but only just. "Oh, yeah? What's that?"

She closes the distance between them, and there's no hesitation there, no trace of doubt, just her mouth, hot and greedy and seductive. She straddles his lap, and his hands go right for her hips, as though they'd played this a hundred times before, though he wants her so badly his heart is pounding.

When she backs off, she stares down at him with one of her insane-brilliant-Hail-Mary smiles, eyes glittering, chest rising and falling as rapidly as his own. "'If you're going through hell, keep going,'" she says, and tips him back onto the bed.

* * *

6.

She's just hitching the comforter higher over her bare shoulder when a husky chuckle brings her all the way awake. "I should have known you'd be a blanket hog."

Helen shifts onto her back to see Will propped on one arm, watching her.

She supposes he's entitled to a bit of turnabout.

The morning sunlight loves him, setting off fire-bright streaks in his hair, picking out the fine stubble covering his chin. She reaches out to feel it, letting it prickle over the pads of her fingers. Will closes his eyes and turns into her touch.

She runs her hand down to his neck, and he leans down to kiss her, cherishing her mouth, even as his hand curves over her stomach, his palm warm against her flank.

"Just for the record, _that_ was me inviting you to sleep with me," he says, his eyes alight, and Helen grins up at him.

"Last night?" she asks, rubbing her thumb over his bottom lip. "Or just now?"

She trails her hand down his body and finds him already hard, and together they render the question moot.


End file.
